"It's Horror All the Way Down"

"As for Miller's vision, it's horror all the way down. He's not looking to solve for this state of nature. He simply calls it 'the real world,' one whose anarchic rules America just needs to accept and use to its benefit. If Miller has read Hobbes, he's drawing the wrong lesson. Even if he might like the idea of Trump as the Leviathanlike authoritarian come to bring order to the chaos (and Miller's recent, and disputed, invocation of a president’s absolute 'plenary authority' would suggest that that’s the case), this is not how Trump understands his role; otherwise, he would be bolstering international institutions and multilateral relationships rather than trashing whatever and whoever does not serve his glory."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic writes about "the dog-eat-dog worldview of this administration."

And Rex Huppke at USA Today asks, "We're really doing another year of this?"

"A Mission to Show That the Great Dead Philosophers Have Been Misunderstood"

"Gottlieb has got Hume's geniality down to a T. 'Every philosopher likes to think he has reached his conclusions via rigorous reasoning,' he says, with a collusive wink to his readers; in the 17th century, indeed, 'falling in love with geometry seems almost to have been an occupational hazard'. Take Descartes: he was notable for 'his faith in his own unusually bright light of reason', but 'perhaps he did not have all the answers'. As for Hobbes, he was so 'bedazzled' by a priori geometry that he 'got rather carried away' and ended up 'over-egging his pudding'. But Leibniz is the one you really have to watch, since, poor fellow, he 'did, in effect, tend to confuse his own mind with that of God'."

Jonathan Rée in The Guardian reviews Gottliebb's The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.

"Radicals in Their Tolerance of Islam"

"The book charts the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in 16th-­century Europe and migration to America a century later. Much of the popular animus toward Islam, she explains, originated in northern Europeans’ fear of the Ottoman Empire (to say nothing of Barbary pirates trolling the Mediterranean for captives). But not every­one took a pejorative view of the faith or its adherents. John Locke, for one, preached toleration and 'civic equality' for England’s Muslim population in the late 1680s, as part of his daring argument for guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of Jews, Roman Catholics and nonconformist Protestants.

"Spellberg specifies Locke as Jefferson’s inspiration and, in the book’s finest pages, sketches a genealogy of his proudest accomplishments, especially the 1786 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which anticipated the First Amendment separating church and state."

 

Kirk Davis Swinehart in The New York Times reviews Denise A. Spellberg's Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders.

"Individual Freedom Cannot Exist without Economic Security and Independence"

"The Rooseveltian liberal preference for public jobs over cash grants for the poor was shared by the patron saint of natural rights liberalism, John Locke, who in the 1690s proposed that the deserving poor be employed at public expense. Will and Voegeli to the contrary, liberals in the Rooseveltian tradition have always favored public work programs like Roosevelt's Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps and Johnson's Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America as an alternative to welfare payments to poor people able to work. It is conservatives who have consistently opposed public work programs. When FDR's National Resources Planning Board in 1943 proposed using a permanent public works program as an alternative to cash relief after the war, conservatives in Congress killed the agency and buried the report. In 1984, when Congress, led by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, created the American Conservation Corps, modeled on the Depression-era CCC, President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill."

Michael Lind in Salon refutes George Will, William Voegeli, and "Straussian falsehoods about American liberalism."